TARA MERENDA NELSON & JERSTIN CROSBY
DOUBLE LIFE

November 14 - December 19, 2026

Join us for a reception with the artists on SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14th, 5 to 8pm

Best Practice presents Double Life, a two-person exhibition featuring recent sand-cast plaster paintings by Jerstin Crosby, miniature tableaux by Tara Merenda Nelson, and printed pages from Nelson’s MY DEEPEST WOUNDS journal.

The exhibition is curated by Joshua Tonies.

 

Seen from an imagined future, these works might appear as curious records of how people made their inner lives tangible. Crosby’s rough, hieroglyphic paintings hold the immediacy of a first recording, their signs hovering between recognition and mystery. Domestic imagery emerges through granular surfaces and overlapping lines, retaining the exposed quality of drawing and the provisional intimacy of a demo tape. Nelson’s tableaus bring objects sourced exclusively from Dollar Tree into intuitive combinations with no prescribed outcome. Altered figures and everyday materials acquire unexpected relationships, making feelings tangible through a process that surprise their maker. Printed pages from MY DEEPEST WOUNDS deepen this inquiry. Charting the first years of sobriety and what Nelson describes as an astrological reckoning, the diary’s writing, drawing, and collage expand the emotional associations of her assemblages.

The exhibition connects these intimate forms to broader practices of recording, improvisation, and self-examination. Nelson’s movement among images and objects feels informed by her work in experimental filmmaking and live audio collage. Her openness to unforeseen combinations meets Crosby’s interest in the roughness and possibility of a demo recording. Together, their works consider how familiar materials can register experiences still taking shape, and how returning to an image or object can reveal something its maker did not initially recognize. Their pairing suggests how much of a life can enter a small, handmade thing and continue to change there.

- Joshua Tonies

As technology continues to accelerate and the pace of life roars forward, Jerstin Crosby feels compelled to subvert this momentum by making what he calls “slow objects”—handmade things that invite pause. Through his work, he creates opportunities for shared contemplation and experiences. 

Jerstin received an MFA from UNC-Chapel Hill and a BFA from the University of Alabama. His work has been featured in Burnaway, New American Paintings, Art Papers, and Art Forum. He was the recipient of a 2023 Snapdragon Research Grant and was commissioned in 2021 by the Downtown Raleigh Alliance to create a permanent outdoor sculpture in the state capitol. His work has been exhibited at the Knockdown Center, Queens, NY, the International Print Center New York, NYC, Ada Gallery, in Richmond, VA, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Greenville, SC, Contemporary Art Museum (CAM), in Raleigh, and the Atlanta Contemporary. The artist is currently in a yearlong artist mentorship program through the NYC Crit Club’s Canopy Program.

Jerstin lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

www.jerstin.com
@jerstinc

 

Tara Merenda Nelson (Rochester, NY) is an artist working in performance, sculpture, sound, small gauge film, and digital media. Her work playfully deconstructs images and objects to experiment with unorthodox combinations and create hybrid forms. Her filmmaking practice includes poetic Super 8 diary films, cable access video comedies, 16mm experimentation, handmade 35mm slides, found footage collage, live sound, and expanded cinema performance. Under the name LOBSTER, Tara performs live, improvisational audio collage using multiple analog playback devices including: variable speed tape decks; Califone turntables; 8 track audio players and synthesizers. Since 2020 Tara has been creating a series of confessional tissue-box tableaus about her mid-life dilemmas composed exclusively with objects from Dollar Tree. Her single-edition artist book, MY DEEPEST WOUNDS, is a handmade diary charting the first years of sobriety and the impact of an astrological reckoning. The book consists of 126 hand-painted pages in a Composition notebook.

www.taranelsonfilms.com
@taramerendanelson

Joshua Tonies is an artist using drawing, animation, photogrammetry, and sound to trace relationships between landscape, memory, ecology, and cultural exchange. Through collaborative and research-driven projects, he assembles archives, document place-based histories, and traces how ecological change, migration, and cultural memory become inscribed within landscapes, images, and the stories attached to them.

His projects frequently engage ecological systems, border regions, and the ways information is recorded, circulated, and preserved across time. Working with both found and self-generated materials, he transforms documents, images, field recordings, and spatial data into works that examine how places are remembered, represented, and continuously remade through social and cultural processes.

His current work delves into the interplay of the artificial and natural, using faux and synthetic materials to explore themes of queer identity, transformation, and ecological consciousness.

Joshua is a Visiting Assistant Professor at University of San Diego and Lecturer at UC San Diego, teaching courses in animation, video art, and studio arts. He has exhibited his work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, The Center for Fiction in NYC, Comfort Station in Chicago Illinois and the San Diego Museum of Art.

www.joshtonies.com
@joshtonies

UPCOMING

Ghost Agency (Anni Garza Lau + Gro Sarauw)
curated by Doreen Rios
February 13 - March 20, 2027

Pastelle Bonito
April 10 - May 15, 2027
(Taller California book launch TBD)

Project PAINT
curated by Morgan Mandalay
June 12 - July 17, 2027

Marina Grize
August 12 - September 18, 2027

Morgan Mandalay
October 9 - November 13, 2027

1955 Julian Avenue
San Diego, CA 92113
map

 25th/Commercial on the Orange Line
Barrio Logan on the Blue Line

Gallery hours (during exhibitions):
Tuesday - Sunday
11am - 4pm